Ruthless

Grandma Ruth’s long life began when a splash of the doctor’s whiskey shocked her into violent newborn protest, kick-starting her reluctant lungs. She turned from blue to pink and never touched another drop.

After retiring, Ruth led a nomadic existence of charitable service, devoting time and means to anyone in need. She traveled constantly, hanging her sensible wardrobe on a retractable closet rod across the back seat of her Oldsmobile. She kept an extra wig in her trunk and a clock radio in her glove box. She camped comfortably on couches wherever she went.

As Ruth’s eldest grandchild, I ran her errands. Never refusing a favor, Ruth stayed extraordinarily busy. She nurtured a need to do everything for everyone simultaneously. Unable to do so alone, she enlisted me, hastily imparting sketchy instructions and turning me loose in her car to secretly facilitate her benevolence.

“Deliver this casserole to the Murphy’s. Just ring and run. Don’t get seen.”

“I have 4-H at three.”

“Then hurry.”

Before my thirteenth birthday I had logged hundreds of helpful miles assisting Ruth’s covert kindness.

Grandma remained fervently religious in a way that I didn’t. So, as I grew, we disagreed now and again about the purpose of life, and whether an embodied creator watched from space rewarding scrupulous behavior. But Grandma always respected my opinion, and her patience showed that much of our apparent disparity lay in our divergent perspectives and the inherent trouble language brings to the endeavor of sharing experience. Ideas stretch out beyond words, she said.

“Try to touch a rainbow. That’s how it is.”

“What is?”

“The fundamental framework. The bottom line. Where we all agree.”

Grandma Ruth rarely slept. She stayed up nights writing. Obsessive tallies she left indicate that throughout her life she mailed over 18,000 letters. While composing, Ruth indulged in her only vice: Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. She loved conspiracy. Late night talk radio was her opium. An affair. Addiction. Art’s stealthy baritone murmured near her sofa after hours every weeknight. Whether inspecting the Face on Mars, mapping Area 51, doubting the Moon Landing, nailing LBJ to JFK, blaming outages on the LHC and earthquakes on HAARP, suspecting the Masons, mistrusting the FBI, questioning 9/11, or memorizing the Mayan Long Count, Grandma Ruth shared strong opinions, fluently defending outrageous ideas in her continual correspondence.

She was old and ailing by the time a particularly intriguing episode of Coast to Coast prompted Ruth to send me on one more errand. Having returned to college to finish an abandoned degree, I had been kayaking every day, reading my books but neglecting classes. I drifted off early one night in my drafty apartment while composing poor poetry about whether or not to finish school. I woke with a start in the wee hours when my cell phone rang for the penultimate time.

“Hello?”

“It’s Grandma. You’re in Blue Lake?”

“I am,” I exaggerated.

“You still live by that clown school?”

“Adjacent, yes.”

“You’re close to Washington?”

“Close enough.”

“Have you heard of that hole up there Art Bell’s talking about on the radio?”

“There’s a lot of weird stuff up there, Grandma.”

“But you haven’t heard of the hole?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe you could drive up and have a look,” she coughed.

Magnified by her forthright appeal to my vague curiosity, her harsh hacking convinced me. She wouldn’t linger forever. Old and ailing, Ruth could no longer hunt down evidence for the esoterica Art unearthed between ads for Gold Bond Medicated Powder. She needed a primary source. I decided to blow off school and run her errand.

“I’ll go find the hole, Grandma.”

“…”

“Grandma!?”

“Due to lack of payment, your cellular phone service has been…”

I took a last look around, grabbed my laundry bag, and engaged the deadbolt. I slid my key back under the door. I wouldn’t be back. I revved Grandma’s antique Oldsmobile, cranked the heater, and drove into the cold Spring night, leaving a tall stack of unpaid bills, several collection warnings, and a form letter rejecting me from graduate school.

I zoomed west several miles, crossing the swollen Mad River, catching 101 North to Crescent City then grabbing 199 inland all the way up the Middle fork of the Smith. I careened through the tunnel and over the pass into Oregon, splitting the puckered hills of the Illinois drainage beyond Cave Junction in the rising morning light. Contemplating what little I knew about my objective, I spotted a black SUV tailing me, way back. I disregarded it and lapsed back to pondering.

The caller was an older gentleman, Ruth had explained—a sort of rambler. He claimed to resemble Willie Nelson and seemed uncomfortable discussing the hole publicly. He told Art Bell it graced the Manastash Ridge west of Ellensburg, and that locals had thrown trash and dead cattle into it for as long as anyone’s ancestors could remember, never filling it. The hole stretched nine feet across with smooth walls all the way down. Ancient looking brickwork reinforced its perimeter. It wasn’t a regular hole. The caller claimed to have lowered 80,000 feet of weighted fishing line into it, finally running out of spools and giving up, exhausted. Confounded, he capped it with corrugated metal and sagebrush limbs and left it alone. Other mysteries surrounded the hole. Long-haul truckers gearing down to climb Manastash Grade sometimes reported a beam of penetrating darkness emanating from the ridge in the vicinity of the hole, obscuring the night sky all the way up, covering stars. Perhaps the hole exuded some sort of dark matter or radiated negative potential. Maybe it absorbed photons. Either way, wild animals avoided it, and nothing grew nearby. Suddenly, beyond Ruth’s rattling hangers, the SUV loomed in my rearview mirror then suddenly fell back. Weird, I thought.

Along the way, I used payphones to check in with Grandma.

“Integrity and attention,” Ruth reminded when I called her from a Chevron on I-5 near Grants Pass. “Focus and intent; Perseverance,” she admonished. “Foster a ruthless voracity for understanding!”

“I have to buy another card, Grandma, I’ll call you back.”

I called again from Springfield.

“Grandma, have you ever seen the McKenzie River? It’s amazing.”

“I’ve seen the Metolius.”

“The one that starts from nothing?”

“Your mom says you were conceived near there.”

“Near where, here?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“I have long way to go, Grandma.”

“When you get there, ask around about a resurrected dog. People say Basques used to lower in sheep to cook.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“See if it’s lined with smooth metal.”

“I will, Grandma.”

Some hypothesized the hole might be a vent for Mount Rainier, evidence of volcanic turmoil geologically crucial for predicting Cascade eruptions. Others insisted it must be an entrance to Earth’s secret interior, a portal to a hidden netherworld—spiritually pivotal for humankind. Speeding by a town called Riddle, I figured it was probably a cavernous crock of shit.

However, I immensely enjoyed watching Grandma Ruth’s dogma dissolve into exuberant conjecture. As my own neurotic preoccupation with infinity and accountability peaked, Ruth’s growing flexibility jarred me from my selfish earnestness and offered angles that soothed my existential anxiety. Over the final decade of her life, Ruth embraced the unexplained, perforating the boundaries of her religious devotion and letting in everything. Though I hated watching her go, I loved the vigor and poise with which she faded, for she became a genuine elder, a formidable shaman. As her body crumpled, her mind flew.

In spite of my skepticism, I found myself sharing Ruth’s enthusiasm for the hole. The search bolstered me. Eager to arrive, I struggled not to strain the worn-out motor. To slow down, I exited I-5 and drove the skinny roads and right angles of the rural Willamette Valley. By the time Ruth’s engine quit, I was thoroughly lost. Securing the steering wheel with a bungee cord, I got out and pushed, heaving a half mile to a defunct service station near a small sign announcing the edge of a tiny town. I limped to the ruined payphone without hope. Nothing. I kicked a rusty gas pump and then, for the hell of it, pried open the cap to the underground tank and idly looked inside.

I imagined, as I peered through the hazy opening, the surrounding oak savannah repeatedly inundated by the Missoula Floods, long before the Calapooia perished and Douglas fir reinvaded. In my mind’s eye, my journey continued. Salem and then Portland rushed by, and I approach the bank of the mighty Columbia, churning along with the intimidating belligerence of a twenty-hand stallion. I floored it up the gorge, running the wipers against the perpetual mist of a million waterfalls.

I awoke staring at the noon sky, my cell phone ringing. My cell phone? Ringing?

“Hello?”

“It’s Grandma.”

“How does my cell phone work?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “Who knows?”

“Grandma, I dreamt I passed Celilo Falls and crossed the Umatilla Dam. I was almost there.”

“Those Columbia dams were built to fuel war,” Ruth said, “They’ve put microphones underwater now. You can’t see the rapids anymore, but you can hear them down there, still roiling through the rough narrows under the tranquil surface. Umatilla was the first dam to power itself. When the grid fails, rebooting will start there. During the war, a Japanese balloon bomb disabled the Hanford Nuclear Facility right across the river and stopped progress on Fat Boy. Can you believe that? Are you in Ellensburg yet?”

“I guess I’m still in”…I strained to re-read the sign: “Tangent. I’m in Tangent.”

“Where?”

“Tangent, Grandma. I was looking into an underground tank, and...”

“You found it?”

“I looked down a hole and gas fumes knocked me out. I’m still in Tangent, lucky to be alive.”

“How deep is it?”

I paused, momentarily bewildered, then plowed ahead, “Nobody’s knows, Grandma. I think at least 30 miles.”

“Do you suppose it goes all the way down?”

“Probably, Grandma.”

“The energy it emits, is it good?”

“It’s the greatest, Grandma, absolutely the best!”

“Where is your laundry?”

“I’m losing you, Grandma!”

“I miss you too, son.”

As I repaired the Oldsmobile under the cracked canopy of the ramshackle station, the black SUV pulled silently into the lot. A gaunt, stately gentleman stepped out, looking remarkably like Willie Nelson, and handed me a paper bag. I looked inside. He had generously gathered my laundry as it gradually blew off the roof where I had tossed it carelessly in the blaze of my hasty departure. He trailed me 300 miles to a vacant lot in outer Tangent in order to hand me a sack of dirty underwear. Amazing.

“You drive fast,” the stranger remarked. “I’d catch up and then have to stop for another sock. I figured with your vehicle blowing that much smoke, you couldn’t get far. And wherever you landed, you’d need your clothes.”

Astounded, I thanked the stranger profusely.

I arrived back at school in time to pass finals and trek south to Grandma’s crowded funeral. There I attempted to adequately explain where I had been and how Ruth’s inquisitive and communicative life demonstrated that we all melt back into the same mystical splendor that spawned us, impulsively and pointlessly trying, toiling together through this mad endeavor, moving eternally and beautifully onward, wide-eyed, wild-hearted, noble, and dynamic—completely engaged and totally ruthless.

I walked out of the chilly chapel and across the street to a stuffy pub. Loosening my tie, I threw down my last 10 bucks for two shots of whiskey. I tossed one back, and while it burned from inside, I carried the other glass back over to the emptying churchyard, pouring it slowly into the holy dirt. I hope they have radios in heaven, Ruth, so you’re not stuck there either. Good night, Grandma.